Simon Critchley
For Heidegger, the call of conscience is one that silences
the chatter of the world and brings me back to myself
After the existential drama of Heidegger's notion of
being-towards-death, why do we need a discussion of conscience? As so often in
Being and Time, Heidegger insists that although his description of
being-towards-death is formally or ontologically correct, it needs more
compelling content at what Heidegger calls the "ontic" level, that
is, at the level of experience. Finitude gets a grip on the self through the
experience of conscience. For me, the discussion of conscience contains the
most exciting and challenging pages in Being and Time. Let me try and sketch as
simply as possible the complex line of Heidegger's argument.
Conscience is a call. It is something that calls one away
from one's inauthentic immersion in the homely familiarity of everyday life. It
is, Heidegger writes, that uncanny experience of something like an external
voice in one's head that pulls one out of the hubbub and chatter of life in the
world and arrests our ceaseless busyness.
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This sounds very close to the Christian experience of
conscience that one finds in Augustine or Luther. In Book 8 of the Confessions,
Augustine describes the entire drama of conversion in terms of hearing an
external voice, "as of a child", that leads him to take up the Bible
and eventually turn away from paganism and towards Christ. Luther describes
conscience as the work of God in the mind of man.
For Heidegger, by contrast, conscience is not God talking to
me, but me talking to myself. The uncanny call of conscience – the pang and
pain of its sudden appearance – feels like an alien voice, but is, Heidegger
insists, Dasein calling to itself. I am called back from inauthentic life in
the world, complete with what Sartre would call its "counterfeit
immortality", towards myself. Furthermore, that self is, as we saw in blog
6, defined in terms of being-towards-death. So, conscience is the experience of
the human being calling itself back to its mortality, a little like Hamlet in
the grave with Yorick's skull.
What gets said in the call of conscience? Heidegger is
crystal clear: like Cordelia in King Lear, nothing is said. The call of
conscience is silent. It contains no instructions or advice. In order to
understand this, it is important to grasp that, for Heidegger, inauthentic life
is characterised by chatter – for example, the ever-ambiguous hubbub of the
blogosphere. Conscience calls Dasein back from this chatter silently. It has
the character of what Heidegger calls "reticence" (Verschwiegenheit),
which is the privileged mode of language in Heidegger. So, the call of
conscience is a silent call that silences the chatter of the world and brings
me back to myself.
But what does this uncanny call of conscience give one to
understand? Conscience's call can be reduced to one word: Guilty! But what does
Dasein's guilt really mean? It means that because, as shown in blog 4, the
human being is defined in terms of thrown projection, it always has its being
to be. That is, human existence is a lack, it is something due to Dasein, a
debt that it strives to make up or repay. This is the ontological meaning of
guilt as Schuld, which can also mean debt. As Heidegger perhaps surprisingly
writes, although it should be recalled that he was also writing in troubled
economic times, "Life is a business whether or not it covers its
costs". Debt is a way of being. I owe therefore I am.
Heidegger goes on to show that this ontological meaning of
guilt as indebtedness is the basis for any traditional moral understanding of
guilt. Heidegger's phenomenology of guilt, and here he is close to Nietzsche in
On the Genealogy of Morals, claims to uncover the deep structure of ethical
selfhood which cannot be defined by morality, since morality already
presupposes it. Rejecting any Christian notion of evil as the privation of good
(privatio boni), Heidegger's claim is that guilt is the pre-moral source for
any morality. As such, it is beyond good or evil. Is guilt bad? No. but neither
is it good. It is simply what we are, for Heidegger. We are guilty. Such is
Kafka's share of eternal truth.
Heidegger insists that Dasein does not load guilt onto
itself. It simply is guilty, always already, as Heidegger liked to say. What
changes in being authentic is that the human being understands the call of
conscience and takes it into itself. Authentic Dasein comes to understand
itself as guilty. In doing this, Dasein has chosen itself, as Heidegger writes.
This is very interesting: what is chosen is not having a conscience, which
Dasein already has because of its ontological want or indebtedness, but what
Heidegger calls, rather awkwardly, "wanting to have a conscience"
(Gewissen-haben-wollen). This is, if you like, a second-order wanting: I choose
to want the want that I am. Only in this way, Heidegger adds, can the human
being be answerable or responsible (verantwortlich). Thus, responsibility –
which would be the key to any conception of ethics in relation to Heidegger's
work, which is, to say the least, a moot point – consists in understanding the
call, in wanting to have a conscience. To make this choice, Heidegger insists,
is to become resolute.
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